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The Trolley Problem

Yale Law Journal 94 (6):1395-1415 (1985)

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  1. The “Bystander at the Switch” Revisited? Ethical Implications of the Government Strategies Against COVID-19.S. Stelios, K. N. Konstantakis & P. G. Michaelides - 2024 - Journal of Bioethical Inquiry 21 (3):501-511.
    Suppose COVID-19 is the runaway tram in the famous moral thought experiment, known as the “Bystander at the Switch.” Consider the two differentiated responses of governments around the world to this new threat, namely the option of quarantine/lockdown and herd immunity. Can we contrast the hypothetical with the real scenario? What do the institutional decisions and strategies for dealing with the virus, in the beginning of 2020, signify in a normative moral framework? This paper investigates these possibilities in order to (...)
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  • Possibilities and challenges in the moral growth of large language models: a philosophical perspective.Guoyu Wang, Wei Wang, Yiqin Cao, Yan Teng, Qianyu Guo, Haofen Wang, Junyu Lin, Jiajie Ma, Jin Liu & Yingchun Wang - 2025 - Ethics and Information Technology 27 (1):1-11.
    With the rapid expansion of parameters in large language models (LLMs) and the application of Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF), there has been a noticeable growth in the moral competence of LLMs. However, several questions warrant further exploration: Is it really possible for LLMs to fully align with human values through RLHF? How can the current moral growth be philosophically contextualized? We identify similarities between LLMs’ moral growth and Deweyan ethics in terms of the discourse of human moral development. (...)
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  • The Calibration Challenge to Philosophical Intuitions.Paul O. Irikefe - forthcoming - Synthese.
    To several critics of the philosophical method of cases—Robert Cummins, Jonathan Weinberg and his colleagues, and Avner Baz—the fact that philosophical intuitions cannot be calibrated means that we cannot rule out the skeptical hypothesis that the outcome of our theorizing based on these intuitions is deeply distorted by our cognitive artifacts. Moreover, they take this hypothesis to license the negative conclusion that we are unable to have much of the armchair knowledge we typically attribute to ourselves when philosophizing based on (...)
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  • Epistemic Rationality and the Value of Truth.Sophia Dandelet - 2024 - Philosophical Review 133 (4):329-365.
    Veritism is the idea that what makes a belief epistemically rational is that it is a fitting response to the value of truth. This idea promises to serve as the foundation for an elegant and systematic treatment of epistemic rationality, one that illuminates the importance of distinctively epistemic normative standards without sacrificing extensional adequacy. But this article proposes that veritism cannot fulfill this promise. It goes on to explain why not, in part by showing that three radically different developments of (...)
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  • The Trolley Problem in the Ethics of Autonomous Vehicles.Norbert Paulo - 2023 - Philosophical Quarterly 73 (4):1046-1066.
    In 2021, Germany passed the first law worldwide that regulates dilemma situations with autonomous cars. Against this background, this article investigates the permissibility of trade-offs between human lives in the context of self-driving cars. It does so by drawing on the debate about the traditional trolley problem. In contrast to most authors in the relevant literature, it argues that the debate about the trolley problem is both directly and indirectly relevant for the ethics of crashes with self-driving cars. Drawing on (...)
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  • Knowledge representation and acquisition for ethical AI: challenges and opportunities.Vaishak Belle - 2023 - Ethics and Information Technology 25 (1):1-12.
    Machine learning (ML) techniques have become pervasive across a range of different applications, and are now widely used in areas as disparate as recidivism prediction, consumer credit-risk analysis, and insurance pricing. Likewise, in the physical world, ML models are critical components in autonomous agents such as robotic surgeons and self-driving cars. Among the many ethical dimensions that arise in the use of ML technology in such applications, analyzing morally permissible actions is both immediate and profound. For example, there is the (...)
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  • The Strange Implications for Bioethics of Taking Christianity Seriously.Stephen Kershnar - 2024 - Sophia 63 (1).
    In this paper, I argue for two theses. First, if Christianity is true, then morality should depend on the metaphysics of the afterlife. Second, if Christianity is true, then contemporary moral theory is mistaken. The argument for the first thesis rests on two premises. If rightness depends on an act’s effects on an individual, then—at least in part—it depends on the long-term effects on him. If rightness depends—at least in part—on the long-term effects on an individual, then it depends on (...)
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  • The Nonconsequentialist Argument from Evil.Justin Mooney - 2022 - Philosophical Studies 179 (12):3599-3615.
    Stringent non-consequentialist constraints on permitting horrendous evils pose a formidable challenge to the project of theodicy by limiting the ways in which it is permissible for God to do or allow evil for the sake of bringing about a greater good. I formulate a general and potent argument against all greater-good theodicies from the existence of robust side constraints on permitting evil. Then I contend that the argument fails. I begin by distinguishing between side constraints on doing evil and side (...)
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  • Turning the trolley with reflective equilibrium.Tanja Rechnitzer - 2022 - Synthese 200 (4):1-28.
    Reflective equilibrium —the idea that we have to justify our judgments and principles through a process of mutual adjustment—is taken to be a central method in philosophy. Nonetheless, conceptions of RE often stay sketchy, and there is a striking lack of explicit and traceable applications of it. This paper presents an explicit case study for the application of an elaborate RE conception. RE is used to reconstruct the arguments from Thomson’s paper “Turning the Trolley” for why a bystander must not (...)
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  • The epistemology of thought experiments without exceptionalist ingredients.Paul O. Irikefe - 2022 - Synthese 200 (3):1-29.
    This paper argues for two interrelated claims. The first is that the most innovative contribution of Timothy Williamson, Herman Cappelen, and Max Deutsch in the debate about the epistemology of thought experiments is not the denial of intuition and the claim of the irrelevance of experimental philosophy but the claim of epistemological continuity and the rejection of philosophical exceptionalism. The second is that a better way of implementing the claim of epistemological continuity is not Deutsch and Cappelen’s argument view or (...)
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  • Kant in the Time of COVID.Matthew C. Altman - 2022 - Kantian Journal 41 (1):89-117.
    During the coronavirus pandemic, communities have faced shortages of important healthcare resources such as COVID-19 vaccines, medical staff, ICU beds and ventilators. Public health officials in the U.S. have had to make decisions about two major issues: which infected patients should be treated first, and which people who are at risk of infection should be inoculated first. Following Beauchamp and Childress’s principlism, adopted guidelines have tended to value both whole lives and life-years. This process of collective moral reasoning has revealed (...)
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  • The only ethical argument for positive δ? Partiality and pure time preference.Andreas L. Mogensen - 2022 - Philosophical Studies 179 (9):2731-2750.
    I consider the plausibility of discounting for kinship, the view that a positive rate of pure intergenerational time preference is justifiable in terms of agent-relative moral reasons relating to partiality between generations. I respond to Parfit's objections to discounting for kinship, but then highlight a number of apparent limitations of this approach. I show that these limitations largely fall away when we reflect on social discounting in the context of decisions that concern the global community as a whole, such as (...)
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  • Self-Defense.Helen Frowe & Jonathan Parry - 2021 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy 2021.
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  • The Influence of Situational Factors in Sacrificial Dilemmas on Utilitarian Moral Judgments.Michael Klenk - 2022 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 13 (3):593-625.
    The standard way to test alternative descriptive theories of moral judgment is by asking subjects to evaluate (amongst others) sacrificial dilemmas, where acting classifies as a utilitarian moral judgment and not acting classifies as a deontological moral judgment. Previous research uncovered many situational factors that alter subject’s moral judgments without affecting which type of action utilitarianism or deontology would recommend. This literature review provides a systematic analysis of the experimental literature on the influence of situational factors on moral judgments in (...)
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  • RETRACTED: Beyond moral dilemmas: The role of reasoning in five categories of utilitarian judgment.François Jaquet & Florian Cova - 2021 - Cognition 209 (C):104572.
    Over the past two decades, the study of moral reasoning has been heavily influenced by Joshua Greene’s dual-process model of moral judgment, according to which deontological judgments are typically supported by intuitive, automatic processes while utilitarian judgments are typically supported by reflective, conscious processes. However, most of the evidence gathered in support of this model comes from the study of people’s judgments about sacrificial dilemmas, such as Trolley Problems. To which extent does this model generalize to other debates in which (...)
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  • (1 other version)Trolleys, Transplants and Inequality: An Egalitarian Proposal.Peter Baumann - 2022 - Erkenntnis 87 (4):1737-1751.
    This paper deals with the core version of the Trolley Problem. In one case many people favor an act which will bring about the death of one person but save five other persons. In another case most people would refuse to “sacrifice” one person in order to save five other lives. Since the two cases seem similar in all relevant respects, we have to explain and justify the diverging verdicts. Since I don’t find current proposals of a solution convincing, I (...)
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  • Ethical Issues with Simulating the Bridge Problem in VR.Erick Jose Ramirez & Scott LaBarge - 2020 - Science and Engineering Ethics 26 (6):3313-3331.
    We aim to generate a dilemma for virtual reality-based research that we motivate through an extended case study of Judith Thomson’s (1985) Bridge variant of the trolley problem. Though the problem we generate applies more broadly than the Bridge problem, we believe it makes a good exemplar of the kind of case we believe is problematic. First, we argue that simulations of these thought experiments run into a practicality horn that makes it practically impossible to produce them. These problems revolve (...)
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  • The Social Turn in Moral Psychology. [REVIEW]Alex Madva - 2019 - Philosophical Review 128 (1):116-121.
    (This is a book review of Mark Fedyk's The Social Turn in Moral Psychology.) Mark Fedyk argues persuasively for both the importance and the perils of interdisciplinarity in studies of ethical life. The book is dense with incisive argumentation and innovative proposals for integrating moral, social, and political philosophy with the psychological and social sciences. It will be of interest to aprioristically inclined normative and social theorists peeking over the fence at the empirical side of things, to experimentalists trying to (...)
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  • Weakening the ethical distinction between euthanasia, palliative opioid use and palliative sedation.Thomas David Riisfeldt - 2019 - Journal of Medical Ethics 45 (2):125-130.
    Opioid and sedative use are common ‘active’ practices in the provision of mainstream palliative care services, and are typically distinguished from euthanasia on the basis that they do not shorten survival time. Even supposing that they did, it is often argued that they are justified and distinguished from euthanasia via appeal to Aquinas’ Doctrine of Double Effect. In this essay, I will appraise the empirical evidence regarding opioid/sedative use and survival time, and argue for a position of agnosticism. I will (...)
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  • Testing for the phenomenal: Intuition, metacognition, and philosophical methodology.Miguel Egler - 2019 - Mind and Language 35 (1):48-66.
    Recent empirical studies raise methodological concerns about the use of intuitions in philosophy. According to one prominent line of reply, these concerns are unwarranted since the empirical studies motivating them do not control for the putatively characteristic phenomenology of intuitions. This paper makes use of research on metacognitive states that have precisely this phenomenology to argue that the above reply fails. Furthermore, it shows that empirical findings about these metacognitive states can help philosophers make better informed assessments of their warrant (...)
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  • What has the Trolley Dilemma ever done for us (and what will it do in the future)? On some recent debates about the ethics of self-driving cars.Andreas Wolkenstein - 2018 - Ethics and Information Technology 20 (3):163-173.
    Self-driving cars currently face a lot of technological problems that need to be solved before the cars can be widely used. However, they also face ethical problems, among which the question of crash-optimization algorithms is most prominently discussed. Reviewing current debates about whether we should use the ethics of the Trolley Dilemma as a guide towards designing self-driving cars will provide us with insights about what exactly ethical research does. It will result in the view that although we need the (...)
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  • The inefficacy objection to consequentialism and the problem with the expected consequences response.Mark Bryant Budolfson - 2019 - Philosophical Studies 176 (7):1711-1724.
    Collective action problems lie behind many core issues in ethics and social philosophy—for example, whether an individual is required to vote, whether it is wrong to consume products that are produced in morally objectionable ways, and many others. In these cases, it matters greatly what we together do, but yet a single individual’s ‘non-cooperative’ choice seems to make no difference to the outcome and also seems to involve no violation of anyone’s rights. Here it is argued that—contrary to influential arguments (...)
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  • Deontology defended.Nora Heinzelmann - 2018 - Synthese 195 (12):5197–5216.
    Empirical research into moral decision-making is often taken to have normative implications. For instance, in his recent book, Greene (2013) relies on empirical findings to establish utilitarianism as a superior normative ethical theory. Kantian ethics, and deontological ethics more generally, is a rival view that Greene attacks. At the heart of Greene’s argument against deontology is the claim that deontological moral judgments are the product of certain emotions and not of reason. Deontological ethics is a mere rationalization of these emotions. (...)
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  • Philosophical expertise under the microscope.Miguel Egler & Lewis Dylan Ross - 2020 - Synthese 197 (3):1077-1098.
    Recent experimental studies indicate that epistemically irrelevant factors can skew our intuitions, and that some degree of scepticism about appealing to intuition in philosophy is warranted. In response, some have claimed that philosophers are experts in such a way as to vindicate their reliance on intuitions—this has become known as the ‘expertise defence’. This paper explores the viability of the expertise defence, and suggests that it can be partially vindicated. Arguing that extant discussion is problematically imprecise, we will finesse the (...)
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  • Ethical Pragmatism.Raff Donelson - 2017 - Metaphilosophy 48 (4):383-403.
    Beginning with a thought experiment about a mysterious Delphic oracle, this article motivates, explains, and attempts to defend a view it calls Ethical Pragmatism. Ethical Pragmatism is the view that we can and should carry on our practice of moral deliberation without reference to moral truths, or more broadly, without reference to metaethics. The defense the article mounts tries to show that neither suspicions about the tenability of fact-value distinctions, nor doubts about the viability of global pragmatism, nor worries about (...)
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  • In Defense of Best-Explanation Debunking Arguments in Moral Philosophy.Jonathon Hricko & Derek Leben - 2018 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 9 (1):143-160.
    We aim to develop a form of debunking argument according to which an agent’s belief is undermined if the reasons she gives in support of her belief are best explained as rationalizations. This approach is a more sophisticated form of what Shaun Nichols has called best-explanation debunking, which he contrasts with process debunking, i.e., debunking by means of showing that a belief has been generated by an epistemically defective process. In order to develop our approach, we identify an example of (...)
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  • Fanciful Examples.Ian Stoner & Jason Swartwood - 2017 - Metaphilosophy 48 (3):325-344.
    This article defends the use of fanciful examples within the method of wide reflective equilibrium. First, it characterizes the general persuasive role of described cases within that method. Second, it suggests three criteria any example must meet in order to succeed in this persuasive role; fancifulness has little or nothing to do with whether an example is able to meet these criteria. Third, it discusses several general objections to fanciful examples and concludes that they are objections to the abuse of (...)
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  • Rational Learners and Moral Rules.Shaun Nichols, Shikhar Kumar, Theresa Lopez, Alisabeth Ayars & Hoi-Yee Chan - 2016 - Mind and Language 31 (5):530-554.
    People draw subtle distinctions in the normative domain. But it remains unclear exactly what gives rise to such distinctions. On one prominent approach, emotion systems trigger non-utilitarian judgments. The main alternative, inspired by Chomskyan linguistics, suggests that moral distinctions derive from an innate moral grammar. In this article, we draw on Bayesian learning theory to develop a rational learning account. We argue that the ‘size principle’, which is implicated in word learning, can also explain how children would use scant and (...)
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  • Should We Wish Well to All?Caspar Hare - 2016 - Philosophical Review 125 (4):451-472.
    Some moral theories tell you, in some situations in which you are interacting with a group of people, to avoid acting in the way that is expectedly best for everybody. This essay argues that such theories are mistaken. Go ahead and do what is expectedly best for everybody. The argument is based on the thought that when interacting with an individual it is fine for you to act in the expected interests of the individual and that many interactions with individuals (...)
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  • Intuitions are Used as Evidence in Philosophy.Nevin Climenhaga - 2018 - Mind 127 (505):69-104.
    In recent years a growing number of philosophers writing about the methodology of philosophy have defended the surprising claim that philosophers do not use intuitions as evidence. In this paper I defend the contrary view that philosophers do use intuitions as evidence. I argue that this thesis is the best explanation of several salient facts about philosophical practice. First, philosophers tend to believe propositions which they find intuitive. Second, philosophers offer error theories for intuitions that conflict with their theories. Finally, (...)
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  • Intuitions, Meaning, and Normativity: Why Intuition Theory Supports a Non‐Descriptivist Metaethic.Matthew S. Bedke - 2016 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 93 (1):144-177.
    Non-descriptivists in metaethics should say more about intuitions. For one popular theory has it that case-based intuitions are in the business of correctly categorizing or classifying merely by bringing to bear a semantic or conceptual competence. If so, then the fact that all normative predicates have case-based intuitions involving them shows that they too are in the business of categorizing or classifying things. This favors a descriptivist position in metaethics—normative predicates have descriptive content—and disfavors a purely non-descriptivist position, like pure (...)
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  • Reasons-Responsiveness and Moral Responsibility: The Case of Autism.Nathan Stout - 2016 - The Journal of Ethics 20 (4):401-418.
    In this paper, I consider a novel challenge to John Martin Fischer and Mark Ravizza’s reasons-responsiveness theory of moral responsibility. According to their view, agents possess the control necessary for moral responsibility if their actions proceed from a mechanism that is moderately reasons-responsive. I argue that their account of moderate reasons-responsiveness fails to provide necessary and sufficient conditions for moral responsibility since it cannot give an adequate account of the responsibility of individuals with autism spectrum disorder. Empirical evidence suggests that (...)
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  • Do non-philosophers think epistemic consequentialism is counterintuitive?James Andow - 2017 - Synthese 194 (7):2631-2643.
    Direct epistemic consequentialism is the idea that X is epistemically permissible iff X maximizes epistemic value. It has received lots of attention in recent years and is widely accepted by philosophers to have counterintuitive implications. There are various reasons one might suspect that the relevant intuitions will not be widely shared among non-philosophers. This paper presents an initial empirical study of ordinary intuitions. The results of two experiments demonstrate that the counterintuitiveness of epistemic consequentialism is more than a philosophers' worry---the (...)
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  • Empirical metaphysics: the role of intuitions about possible cases in philosophy.J. L. Dowell - 2008 - Philosophical Studies 140 (1):19-46.
    Frank Jackson has argued that only if we have a priori knowledge of the extension-fixers for many of our terms can we vindicate the methodological practice of relying on intuitions to decide between philosophical theories. While there has been much discussion of Jackson’s claim that we have such knowledge, there has been comparatively little discussion of this most powerful argument for that claim. Here I defend an alternative explanation of our intuitions about possible cases, one that does not rely on (...)
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  • Philosophical Method and Intuitions as Assumptions.Kevin Patrick Tobia - 2015 - Metaphilosophy 46 (4-5):575-594.
    Many philosophers claim to employ intuitions in their philosophical arguments. Others contest that no such intuitions are used frequently or at all in philosophy. This article suggests and defends a conception of intuitions as part of the philosophical method: intuitions are special types of philosophical assumptions to which we are invited to assent, often as premises in argument, that may serve an independent function in philosophical argument and that are not formed through a purely inferential process. A series of philosophical (...)
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  • A fallacious jar? The peculiar relation between descriptive premises and normative conclusions in neuroethics.Nils-Frederic Wagner & Georg Northoff - 2015 - Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 36 (3):215-235.
    Ethical questions have traditionally been approached through conceptual analysis. Inspired by the rapid advance of modern brain imaging techniques, however, some ethical questions appear in a new light. For example, hotly debated trolley dilemmas have recently been studied by psychologists and neuroscientists alike, arguing that their findings can support or debunk moral intuitions that underlie those dilemmas. Resulting from the wedding of philosophy and neuroscience, neuroethics has emerged as a novel interdisciplinary field that aims at drawing conclusive relationships between neuroscientific (...)
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  • The Closeness Problem and the Doctrine of Double Effect: A Way Forward.S. Matthew Liao - 2016 - Criminal Law and Philosophy 10 (4):849-863.
    A major challenge to the Doctrine of Double Effect is the concern that an agent’s intention can be identified in such a fine-grained way as to eliminate an intention to harm from a putative example of an intended harm, and yet, the resulting case appears to be a case of impermissibility. This is the so-called “closeness problem.” Many people believe that one can address the closeness problem by adopting Warren Quinn’s version of the DDE, call it DDE*, which distinguishes between (...)
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  • Moral Judgment and Deontology: Empirical Developments.Joshua May - 2014 - Philosophy Compass 9 (11):745-755.
    A traditional idea is that moral judgment involves more than calculating the consequences of actions; it also requires an assessment of the agent's intentions, the act's nature, and whether the agent uses another person as a means to her ends. I survey experimental developments suggesting that ordinary people often tacitly reason in terms of such deontological rules. It's now unclear whether we should posit a traditional form of the doctrine of double effect. However, further research suggests that a range of (...)
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  • Distinguishing Between Three Versions of the Doctrine of Double Effect Hypothesis in Moral Psychology.Simon Fitzpatrick - 2014 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 5 (4):505-525.
    Based on the results of empirical studies of folk moral judgment, several researchers have claimed that something like the famous Doctrine of Double Effect may be a fundamental, albeit unconscious, component of human moral psychology. Proponents of this psychological DDE hypothesis have, however, said surprisingly little about how the distinction at the heart of standard formulations of the principle—the distinction between intended and merely foreseen consequences—might be cognised when we make moral judgments about people’s actions. I first highlight the problem (...)
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  • Pushing moral buttons: The interaction between personal force and intention in moral judgment.Joshua D. Greene, Fiery A. Cushman, Lisa E. Stewart, Kelly Lowenberg, Leigh E. Nystrom & Jonathan D. Cohen - 2009 - Cognition 111 (3):364-371.
    In some cases people judge it morally acceptable to sacrifice one person’s life in order to save several other lives, while in other similar cases they make the opposite judgment. Researchers have identified two general factors that may explain this phenomenon at the stimulus level: (1) the agent’s intention (i.e. whether the harmful event is intended as a means or merely foreseen as a side-effect) and (2) whether the agent harms the victim in a manner that is relatively “direct” or (...)
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  • Dilemmas, Conspiracies, and Sophie’s Choice: Vignette Themes and Ethical Judgments.Peter E. Mudrack & E. Sharon Mason - 2013 - Journal of Business Ethics 118 (3):639-653.
    Knowledge about ethical judgments has not advanced appreciably after decades of research. Such research, however, has rarely addressed the possible importance of the content of such judgments; that is, the material appearing in the brief vignettes or scenarios on which survey respondents base their evaluations. Indeed, this content has seemed an afterthought in most investigations. This paper closely examined the vast array of vignettes that have appeared in relevant research in an effort to reduce this proliferation to a more concise (...)
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  • The Significance of Transferred Intent.Peter Westen - 2013 - Criminal Law and Philosophy 7 (2):321-350.
    The doctrine of transferred intent (or transferred “malice” in England) generally provides that if A attempts to harm B but, because of bad aim, misses and accidentally causes the same harm to befall C, A’s harmful intent vis-à-vis B is transferred to C, thus rendering A guilty of intentionally harming C. Commentators acknowledge the doctrine to be a legal fiction, but they differ regarding whether the fiction produces just results, some believing it does, others believing that A is guilty at (...)
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  • Morality and Evolutionary Biology.William Fitzpatrick - 2008 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
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  • On the Wrong Track: Process and Content in Moral Psychology.Guy Kahane - 2012 - Mind and Language 27 (5):519-545.
    According to Joshua Greene’s influential dual process model of moral judgment, different modes of processing are associated with distinct moral outputs: automatic processing with deontological judgment, and controlled processing with utilitarian judgment. This paper aims to clarify and assess Greene’s model. I argue that the proposed tie between process and content is based on a misinterpretation of the evidence, and that the supposed evidence for controlled processing in utilitarian judgment is actually likely to reflect generic deliberation which, ironically, is incompatible (...)
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  • The Doctrine of Double Effect: Intention and Permissibility.William J. FitzPatrick - 2012 - Philosophy Compass 7 (3):183-196.
    The Doctrine of Double Effect (DDE) is an influential non-consequentialist principle positing a role for intention in affecting the moral permissibility of some actions. In particular, the DDE focuses on the intend/foresee distinction, the core claim being that it is sometimes permissible to bring about as a foreseen but unintended side-effect of one’s action some harm it would have been impermissible to aim at as a means or as an end, all else being equal. This article explores the meaning and (...)
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  • Intuitional Epistemology in Ethics.Matthew S. Bedke - 2010 - Philosophy Compass 5 (12):1069-1083.
    Here I examine the major theories of ethical intuitions, focusing on the epistemic status of this class of intuitions. We cover self-evidence theory, seeming-state theory, and some of the recent contributions from experimental philosophy.
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  • Moral Reasoning: Hints and Allegations.Joseph M. Paxton & Joshua D. Greene - 2010 - Topics in Cognitive Science 2 (3):511-527.
    Recent research in moral psychology highlights the role of emotion and intuition in moral judgment. In the wake of these findings, the role and significance of moral reasoning remain uncertain. In this article, we distinguish among different kinds of moral reasoning and review evidence suggesting that at least some kinds of moral reasoning play significant roles in moral judgment, including roles in abandoning moral intuitions in the absence of justifying reasons, applying both deontological and utilitarian moral principles, and counteracting automatic (...)
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  • The Linguistic Analogy: Motivations, Results, and Speculations.Susan Dwyer, Bryce Huebner & Marc D. Hauser - 2010 - Topics in Cognitive Science 2 (3):486-510.
    Inspired by the success of generative linguistics and transformational grammar, proponents of the linguistic analogy (LA) in moral psychology hypothesize that careful attention to folk-moral judgments is likely to reveal a small set of implicit rules and structures responsible for the ubiquitous and apparently unbounded capacity for making moral judgments. As a theoretical hypothesis, LA thus requires a rich description of the computational structures that underlie mature moral judgments, an account of the acquisition and development of these structures, and an (...)
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  • Doctrine of double effect.Alison McIntyre - 2008 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    The doctrine (or principle) of double effect is often invoked to explain the permissibility of an action that causes a serious harm, such as the death of a human being, as a side effect of promoting some good end. According to the principle of double effect, sometimes it is permissible to cause a harm as a side effect (or “double effect”) of bringing about a good result even though it would not be permissible to cause such a harm as a (...)
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  • Contractualism.Elizabeth Ashford - 2008 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
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